Game Design & Creative Consultation
- Published Games
- About Giantsdance
- Brú-Tiki, etc.
- Links & News
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Giantsdance Games is a game design and consulting company owned by industry veteran Andy Ashcraft. Andy's goal is to help you make better games based on your ideas and intellectual properties. Let our experience work for you. There is enormous potential for games to reach a much broader market than they ever have before. At the same time, there is significantly more competition for our audience's time, interest and dollars. As Giantsdance Game Design, Andy can provide his game design and production experience and passion for great games to your game project. With his expertise, the quality of your game can shine through the storm and find the audience your idea deserves. |
Published Titles (newest at top): | |
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Cars 2 AppMATes (Disney Mobile, iOS) - Andy lead the game design for this genre-creating kids' games from prototype to completion. | |
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JellyCar 3 (Disney Mobile, iOS) - Andy designed levels for this exceptionally fun iOS game. | |
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TRON (Disney Mobile, iOS) - Andy worked with various groups within Disney to conceptualize and bring together the multi-game contest that was central to the App. | |
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Toy Story 3: Operation Camouflage (Disney Mobile, iOS) - Andy wrote the final draft of the dialog script to pass through Pixar's and Disney's exacting standards. | |
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Discovery Kids Laptop (Great Music of Malibu) - Andy lead the game design and art team to create 64 fun and educational games built in to this low-price toy laptop. Andy and his team updated this design again in 2012. | |
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World of Zoo (Blue Fang/THQ, Wii & PC) - Andy managed the creative aspects with developer Blue Fang on this beautiful game about being a zookeeper. | |
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Lock's Quest (5th Cell/THQ, NintendoDS) - As a Creative Manager for THQ, Andy worked closely with external developer 5th Cell on this award-winning DS game. | |
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God of War 2 (SCEA, PS2) - Andy jumped in at alpha to help the team place and debug cameras throughout the levels. | |
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Warhawk (SCEA, PS3) - Andy worked closely with other designers on basic gameplay, level designs, character designs and vehicle designs. | |
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War of the Monsters (SCEA, PS2) - Andy joined Sony at the end of the project, but managed to give creative input on some of the character designs. | |
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Floigan Bros. (Visual Concepts/Sega, Dreamcast) - Andy was hired as a game designer, but ended up managing the team and getting the game shipped. | |
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Return to Krondor (7th Level/Sierra, PC) - Originally hired as a game designer, Andy also took over the producing reins for a time. | |
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Muppet Treasure Island (Activision, PC) - Andy was consulted to organize the interactive script. |
Why "Giantsdance"? This word is a very old name for Stonehenge, the ancient wonder that presides over the Salisbury plain. But here,"Giantsdance" is evocative of ideas that are at once Big, Fun and Earthshaking. Those concepts serve as the touchstones for every game project we work on. Who ARE you people? Giantsdance is a Sole Proprietorship of Andy Ashcraft, a game industry veteran since 1995. Andy has worked as a game designer and creative manager, 3d artist and animator, production manager and producer, but the majority of his expertise - and his enthusiasm - is as a game designer. See Andy's full resumé here: (updated January 19, 2013) |
Creative Services Here are just some of the ways that Giantsdance can help you make your game the best it can be:
On occasion, Andy also recruits help from the a vast army of talented people he has worked with in the past: game designers, audio designers and composers, artists and animators, UI designers, and engineers. This is another strength Andy can bring to your project. |
| Brú-Tiki!
Brú-Tiki is a new board-less board game I designed this spring. I've entered it into both the IndieCade juried competition (in October) and in the Cards Against Humanity Tabletop Design Deathmatch in August. These slides show the game as it is played. Wish me luck! |
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| More Games!
Frequently, I have ideas for board games, card games, role-playing game mechanics and other bits and pieces of games. Those ideas that prove out to be fun and entertaining will be posted here for you to download, print and play. |
Piranha! Could a card game model a school of bloodthirsty fish? Print 6 copies of these cards, and as many copies as you like of these rules to find out. This game resulted from a quick exercise from the excellent Game Design Workshop at the 2007 GDC. More to come! |
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| Links
Andy's lovely and talented wife, stand-up comic Jackie Kashian! Andy has(in the past and possibly again in the future) written about non-game related topics here on Open Salon.
More to Come! |
News
(5/30/'13) I just submitted a new board game design - called Brú-Tiki to IndieCadestrong>. You can see pictures of this game prototype under the Brú-Tiki tab. (3/25-26/'13) I helped Marc LeBlanc and some other legendary game designers teach the two-day Game Design Tutorial at GDC this year. I've been though that course several times in the past and can highly recommend it (even if I'm not helping teach it.) (2/7/'13) I had a great time at Apps World mobile development conference in San Francisco. (9/17/'12) I gave a short talk about keeping you game design fresh through clever economics at the Game Design Conference in San Francisco. (4/12/'12) Disney Mobile released the Tokyo world update we designed for Cars2 AppMates (ipad) game released last year. This update doubles the size of the play area and adds tons of new features. (9/27/'11) Cars2 AppMates (ipad) released by Disney Mobile. (5/30/'11) Briana Young's documentary Screw It, I'll Play Make Believe is now out on DVD (and streaming from a variety of sources). This is the documentary for which we created the game "Wedding Survivor", last year. (12/12/'10) TRON (iphone and ipad) released by Disney Mobile. (10/26/'10) Disney releases Toy Story 3: Operation Camouflage for iPhone and iPad (9/26/'10) Through Live Game Labs , Aaron Vanek, David Milano and I created Trail of the Necronomicon for patrons of the West Hollywood Book Fair. (6/27/'10) Andy designed and ran LARP called Wedding Survivor with co-GM Graydon Schlicter. Wedding Survivor is a LARP designed to be videotaped for a documentary about live games being made by filmmaker Briana Young. (6/10/'10) Ran The Time Traveller's Knife, a large public game at Greenwood Cemetary in Brooklyn for Come Out and Play! Must thank (belatedly) my co-writers Chris Hall, Kaitlin Heller, Jessica Hammer, Rizwan Kassim, and the players and assitant GMs that braved the heat to, well, come out and play! Also, Hey! We won the Best use of Narrative award!" (1/10/'10) Began working with a new and large client on some fun iPhone games! Sadly, Giantsdance Games is barred from publicly promoting our affiliation with this client for legal reasons. Go look at Andy's personal resume. (9/15/'09) Started a project with Great Music of Malibu to design the game-play and redo much of the artwork and UI for a cool low-cost kids laptop to be branded for Discovery Kids." (8/19/'09) I've just had the pleasure of reviewing some excellent game design from Recoil Games. It's a great project that I'm proud to have as my first work as Giantsdance Games. (8/14/'09) Besides the ever-increasing professionalism of this website (thank you Ed B. and Andrew S!), I've also posted a little card game - called Piranha - that I mocked up after an excellent Game Design Workshop at GDC in 2007. You can find it under the Downloads tab. - AndyA |